God Save the Mods

Director Franc Roddam's Quadrophenia, newly out on Blu-ray from Criterion, is set in roughly the same era—now half a century ago—as George Lucas's American Graffiti. But comparing the two is a crash course in the differences between American and British youth culture back in the days when both were kicking their way out of the womb. Our Transatlantic cousins never did set much value on innocence.

Celebrating innocence, you may remember, is the Lucas movie's be-all and end-all. Beneficiaries of a post-World War II affluence that they have no idea isn't how life usually works, the small-town kids in American Graffiti are feeling their generational oats without a clue about what's coming at them—bad stuff like the JFK assassination and the war in Vietnam. But their Brit equivalents had no illusions except about the permanence of youth's own supremacy.

Generally less affluent than their cars-and-girls, surfin'-safari Stateside counterparts, they were such creatures of the U.K. class system that their idea of rebellion was to duplicate its inequalities by dividing into Mods (lower-middle-class kids in love with poshness and novelty) and Rockers (tending more prole and already clinging to rock's fledgling traditions). It was and is part of our self-image to believe that class distinctions can always be erased in a flash by democracy's wonders. On the other side of the pond, sociological hierarchies define everything, revolutions included.

Which could be why—sorry, Green Day—there will never be any such thing as a good American rock opera. We aren't the people best equipped to understand the antagonism involved in claiming the upper crust's art form as your own, even as you burlesque its pretensions by substituting different ones. The Who's lead composer, Pete Townsend, always admitted that calling the band's 1968 Tommy an opera was a more or less nose-thumbing goof (and nobody's honker was more thumbable). In its original incarnation as the album no mid-1970s college freshman could escape—Jethro Tull's Aqualung was the heavyweight competition—Quadrophenia was when he and his mates tried to live up to the billing in earnest.

Considering how long on rhetoric and short on storyline the original album is, the fact that Roddam turned Quadrophenia into a coherent movie, let alone an impressive and often thrilling one, is some kind of miracle. Probably in reaction to Ken Russell's gaga film version of Tommy, one smart decision was to stick the songs on the soundtrack instead of having the characters perform them. For that matter, they're also fairly marginal until the climax, when the big tunes start going off like grenades. (If some of their roar has dated badly—no way around it, Roger Daltrey often sounds like a histrionic clod—a lot more of it hasn't.) Instead of being conceived as a musical, let alone an opera, the movie is one of filmdom's quirkiest-ever versions of an origin story—an attempt to depict the alternately grim and exhilarating early-'60s realities that inspired Townsend's magnum opus a decade later.

The central figure is still Townsend's archetypal fucked-up kid, Jimmy, played by Phil Daniels with an affecting mix of impishness and anguish—not that you can't help wondering about the movie that might have been if the filmmakers' original choice, Johnny Rotten, hadn't been vetoed at some point. (One fascination is that Rotten, fresh from calumniating the '60s rock establishment up and down the block with the Sex Pistols, really wanted the part.) Now, though, the hero is rooted in a much more specific context, from his McJob as an ad-agency gofer to his dreary home life with his believably baffled, increasingly fed-up parents. Like John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever, a movie that may have given Roddam a few pointers, Jimmy lives for the pill-popping highs of his own kind's tribal rituals: the Vespa scooters, skinny-tie suits and parkas, and musical tastes—from Phil Spector to the early Who—that tag them as Mods.

Maybe especially to American boomers' eyes, the striking thing about Quadrophenia is that it isn't a bit nostalgic. There's certainly no soft-focus implication that these were best days of anyone's lives, or even especially happy ones—droogy desperation palliated by drug-fueled high spirits is more like it. Although the way the protracted denouement turns Jimmy into a weepy-eyed outcast does lay it on a bit thick, the movie isn't particularly sentimental, either. Far from being one of those "misunderstood" James Dean types whose problems would be cured the instant some insightful chick appreciated his beautiful soul, the pillhead hero is genuinely damaged teenage goods with incoherent needs that keep him lashing out in all directions. Even the girl of his dreams—Steph, played by Leslie Ash—turns out to be no solution at all, since she's a shallow minx who doesn't give a fig for loyalty.

The way Jimmy clings to being a Mod as if it's a cause and not just a fashion is poignant and, lord knows, accurate about teenhood allegiance. But Roddam treats it objectively; he isn't a cheerleader. He doesn't depict the violence between Mods and Rockers as if it's anything other than stupid and pointless, especially when Jimmy's decent, thoughtful childhood mate Kevin (Ray Winstone) gets set upon by a bunch of Mods because he's wearing Rocker gear. Once Jimmy recognizes his old pal, he flees the scene—but he doesn't try to stop the beating.

The movie shifts into mordant high gear when the scene changes to Brighton—site of the fabled Mod-Rocker clashes of 1964, which are recreated here on a large scale. The more Jimmy tries to convince himself that the mass hooliganism he's participating in is epochal and somehow consequential, the more pathetic and isolated he becomes. That he believes there's something idealistic about all this ends up marking him out as a fool even to his fellow Mods. Then the disillusionment of discovering the penny-ante truth about their ultimate role model, Ace the Face (Sting, who's not bad at all), marks him out as a fool even to himself.

But that's how it goes with teen subcultures, no matter how ecstatic belonging to one can make the Jimmys of this world feel for a while—a remarkably downbeat message for a movie that was, after all, aimed at the rock audience. You have to marvel a little that none other than Pete Townsend—whose own rock-as-salvation palaver was the most overblown in the music's history—ended up inventing a kid who really believed rock could save his life and ended up destroyed instead.